How to Export Contacts From Exchange Shared Mailboxes?

Aftab Alam
Updated On - 24 Jan 2019

A shared mailbox in Exchange Server is a crucial place to send or receive messages collectively. In a professional organization, a shared mailbox is extremely helpful as it makes it easier to schedule the meetings, plan the vacations, manage the shifts, create calendar events and much more. You can see various examples of shared mailboxes in your organizations like technical support mailbox, customer support mailbox, help desk, complaint mailbox, etc. All these are shared mailbox where multiple users can receive the emails, rectify queries, and send solutions.

Properties of a shared mailbox –

The shared mailbox does not have a dedicated username and password, but the Exchange Administrator creates a generic email address like contact@compnaydomain.com, info@companydomain.com, support@compnaydomain.com, complaint@companydomain.com.

Multiple users can get emails and reply to them.

It centralizes the service required to the client. Any authorized user can answer to the requested service or query.

A user cannot directly log on to a shared mailbox unless the administrator provides following permissions based on the action required by the users

Full Access – If a user has Full Access permission on a shared mailbox, then the user can access the emails, reply to them, create contacts, calendar event, and even delete the items.

NOTE – Although the Full Access permission levels provide complete authority to the user, the user must have either “Send As” or “Send on Behalf” permissions also to send the email.

Send As – The user can send an email to the client from the shared mailbox.

Send on Behalf – with the help of Send on Behalf permission level, the user can send an email on behalf of the shared mailbox. For example, John is a member of IT support department. When John when either reply or send emails to the client, then the client will get a message with the sender as “John on Behalf of IT Support”.

Till now you must have got the idea that shared mailbox is an important part of an organization, and it contains some vital information related to the business processes. To make sure that the data is always healthy and accessible, you need to take backup of the data at routine intervals and keep it at a secure location. Here, we will learn to export contacts from a shared mailbox. There is a manual process in Outlook (where you have configured the shared mailbox), by which you can export contacts to an external file. Here is the process-
Step – 1 – Start the Outlook application. Go to File, then click Open & Export option.

Step – 2 – Select the option Import/Export option.

Step – 3 – Select the second option of Export to a File.

Step – 4 – Select the option Comma Separated Values, then click Next.

Step – 5 – Select the Contacts folder and click Next.

Step – 6 – Browse the destination location and a new name to the CSV file.

Step – 7 – Click the Finish button to finalize the process.

After completing the process, you can access the new CSV file with all your contacts in the shared mailbox.

Conclusion

This was the manual process of saving contacts from a shared mailbox to a CSV file. Although the contacts are saved, you can only access the contacts; you cannot use them instantly. To be able to use the contacts, you need to save the contacts in the PST file.

If you want to export a large amount of data and multiple mailboxes, then you should take the help of a professional tool. Kernel for Exchange Server Recovery is the best tool which can export both healthy and corrupt files. It accesses the complete Exchange database and exports them to the desired destination. You can export EDB to PST, Office 365, Exchange Online, and Public Folder.